5 Critical Pieces of Data for the Smart Marketer

Who are your customers? What do they look like, act like, earn like, spend like, value, mistrust, and need? For the B2C marketer, this means demographic information, but also a deeper understanding of your buyers and what they're after when they purchase your product. Ideally, today's marketers will use the data to create multiple buyer personas. This is often called customer segmentation, or breaking the single customer persona into smaller, more narrowly-defined categories.

For the B2B marketer, substitute demographics for firmographics. Firmographics is like demographics for companies. It includes data points like the industry the business serves, the size of business in terms of employees, size of business in terms of revenue, location of the business, etc. Like demographic data, firmographic data can be used to break up the customer persona into smaller segments that can be targeted with marketing messages with pinpointed accuracy, since the marketer knows and understands these customer segments so well -- thanks to the data.

Customer's Interaction With Your Website and Content

Part of knowing your customers so well is collecting and analyzing the metrics of when, how, how often, and to what end these customers interact with your website. Do they come in through your homepage or follow an Internet search directly to one of your landing pages? Do they linger? Download free content? Visit the blog? These metrics are useful in determining at what stage of the buying process to deliver what types of content, as well as for deciding what kinds of content are most popular with your various buyers.

Customer's Interaction With You on Social Media

Are your customers active on social media? If so, do they like or follow you? Do they share your content and messages? Do they engage in your hashtag campaigns? Also, track other mentions of your brand and products outside your own pages. Are people talking about your products or your advertisements? Combined with your in-house data, this information is powerful marketing fodder.

Customer's Interaction With You Via Email

Products like MailChimp and Marketo can track when customers open an email, follow email links, or respond to your emails. This is valuable data for tracking the effectiveness of particular messages to your various customer personas. For example, are they more likely to contact you for a consult or redeem a coupon? Is a free trial or demo more effective? This information helps you fine-tune your customer personas, but it is also useful for building future campaigns, content, and messages.

Customer's Interaction With Your Company Outside Sales & Marketing

Track your customers touches with the organization outside of sales and marketing, such as their interactions with tech support and the billing department.

All of these focus on the data found in your sales and marketing tools, like CRMs and marketing automation software. But you can get so much more data and develop such a deeper and richer picture of your various customers when these systems are integrated across the organization. You can then combine your sales and marketing data with customer touchpoints in finance, tech support, customer service, etc.